A report by Price Waterhouse Coopers (PWC) on medical cost trends for 2012 provides a dismal forecast of continued increases that consumers will see in their health care costs.
Key findings of the PWC report indicate:

The Democrats’ health care law has done little to ease the compliance burdens facing employers – as the PWC report points out, “employers have had their hands full complying with the avalanche of new regulations under PPACA.”

Medical costs are expected to increase: PWC expects medical costs to increase 8.5% in 2012, up from 8% in 2011.

More Americans will NOT be able to keep the health care coverage they have and like, with the report noting that “some employers are becoming less confident in their ability to offer health benefits on a long term basis.”

Of note:

84% of employers are likely to make changes to offset the costs associated with the Democrats’ health care law,

86% are likely to re-evaluate their overall benefits strategy, and

50% are considering significantly changing or eliminating company subsidies for dependent medical coverage.

Let’s consider the attitudes of leftists. Take Chairman Mao - who has been publicly praised by top Obama officials.

“The atom bomb is nothing to be afraid of,” Mao told Nehru, “China has many people. . . . The deaths of ten or twenty million people is nothing to be afraid of.” A witness said Nehru showed shock. Later, speaking in Moscow, Mao displayed yet more generosity: he boasted that he was willing to lose 300 million people, half of China’s population.” [Annie Dillard, “The Wreck of Time” in Harper’s from January 1998].

LEE EDWARDS, CHAIRMAN, VICTIMS OF COMMUNISM MEMORIAL FOUNDATION: In 1959 to 1961 was the so-called “great leap forward” which was actually a gigantic leap backwards in which he tried to collectivize and communize agriculture.

And they came to him after the first year and they said, “Chairman, five million people have died of famine.” He said, “No matter, keep going.” In the second year, they came back and they said, “Ten million Chinese have died.” He said, “No matter, continue.” The third year, 20 million Chinese have died. And he said finally, “Well, perhaps this is not the best idea that I’ve ever had.”

CHANG: When he was told that, you know, his people were dying of starvation, Mao said, “Educate the peasants to eat less. Thus they can benefit – they can fertilize the land.”

Think of energy. Liberals have demonized oil, gas, coal, nuclear and everything else that actually produces energy. They want to leave us with “renewable energy” which produces about 8% of our energy needs. What are we going to do for the rest? Obama says he plans to bankrupt the coal energy which supplies half of America’s electricity. Obama has continued to pursue this reckless policy with regulations that are crippling us. What are we going to do? And the shocking secret is it doesn’t matter to them.

And the reason that the Kim Jong Ils and the Chairman Maos and the Joseph Stalins and the Barack Obamas stay in power is that people simply can’t believe that their leaders are truly that depraved.

They don’t care about your LIFE, let alone about your health care. These people hate God, and they want to create massive government in place of God, and they want to be the high priests of that government, and they want you to come hat in hand and bow down before them such that they get to decide who the winners and losers are.

The beast is coming. He too will be a leftist. He will actually be able to create what the left have been dreaming of for a generation and beyond: a one-world government. He will be a big government totalitarian who will promise to take care of everybody just as every leftist has done from Karl Marx to Stalin to Hitler to Chairman Mao to Kim Il Sung Pol Pot Mao to Kim Jong Il. He will produce a government system in place of God, and then he will declare himself as god over that government (Daniel 9:27; Matthew 24:15-21; 2 Thessalonians 2:3-4; Revelation chapter 13.

D. James Kennedy issued a prophetic warning: “Watch out, Grandpa! Because the generation that survived abortion will one day come after YOU!”

Senior citizens – and those close to being senior citizens – are going to find out that they aren’t working anymore, which means they are no longer productive. Their going to find out that aging people consume vastly more medical resources than younger, healthier people. They’re going to find out that Obama has already spent America into staggering debt that it cannot possibly repay. And they’re going to find out that liberals think they’ve already lived their “complete lives.”

Justice Roger Vinson of the U.S. District Court in Pensacola ruled today that the primary mechanism used by the health reform legislation to achieve universal insurance coverage–the individual mandate–is illegal. If his ruling stands it would void the 2,700 page, $938 billion health reform bill passed last year.

“Because the individual mandate is unconstitutional and not severable, the entire Act must be declared void. This has been a difficult decision to reach, and I am aware that it will have indeterminable implications,” Vinson writes.

With this ruling, and a similar one in December by Judge Henry Hudson in Virginia, it’s likely that the U.S. Supreme Court will be the final arbiter of whether ObamaCare stands. Two other lawsuits–one in Michigan and one in Virginia–were thrown out by other federal district judges last year who ruled the constitutional challenge lacked merit.

Most analysts were expecting a ruling in favor of the 26 states hoping to overturn the bill. Vinson, in an earlier ruling, suggested that the federal fine for not buying insurance is more of a penalty than a tax. If it’s a penalty, the legislation relies on a broad interpretation of federal regulatory powers. If it’s a tax, as the Department of Justice’s lawyers argued, it’s much more difficult to make a constitutional objection.

In today’s ruling Vinson considered two arguments made by Florida Attorney General Bill McCollum, the lead plaintiff on the lawsuit. The first was the legislation forces states to expand Medicaid in a way that’s unaffordable. Vinson quickly dispatches that legal theory, pointing out that Medicaid is and always has been a voluntary program.

The second argument revolves around the individual mandate. The health reform legislation makes it illegal for insurers to discriminate against patients regardless of their health. With that change there’s a risk that only sick people would buy insurance and healthy people would wait or be priced out of the market. To address that problem, the bill forces everyone who does not have insurance to buy it. The combination of “guaranteed issue” and the “individual mandate” is the beating heart of the health bill.

While the new rules banning medical underwriting are popular, the individual mandate has bred resentment. The bill’s authors never anticipated the mandate would become a ripe target for legal challenges.

The argument that’s had the most traction is based on the limitations of the Commerce Clause of the Constitution. The Commerce Clause explicitly allows the federal government regulate interstate commerce. But it also has been used to justify federal laws that affect other kinds of economic activity. The question raised by the lawsuit against the health reform bill is whether refusing to buy insurance constitutes interstate commerce. In his ruling Vinson says that in the past the Commerce Clause has been used to regulate activities like growing marijuana or navigating a waterway, but not used to force someone to do something they weren’t already doing. “It would be a radical departure from existing case law to hold that Congress can regulate inactivity under the Commerce Clause,” he writes.

Vinson rejects the administration’s argument that the health care market is unique since nobody can truly opt out–and that not buying insurance is in itself an economic activity since the cost of care then falls on others. Vinson mocks this argument, writing: “Everyone must participate in the food market… under this logic, Congress could [mandate] that every adult purchase and consume wheat bread daily.” If they didn’t buy wheat bread they might have a bad diet which would put a strain on the health care system, he writes.

Later he offers another analogy: “Congress could require that everyone above a certain income threshold buy a General Motors automobile — now partially government-owned — because those who do not buy GM cars (or those who buy foreign cars) are adversely impacting commerce and a taxpayer-subsidized business.” Vinson concludes: “The individual mandate exceeds Congress’ commerce power, as it is understood, defined, and applied in the existing Supreme Court case law.”

Judge Vinson marshalled quite a few opinions against ObamaCare. Interestingly, one of them was Obama’s himself.

In ruling against President Obama‘s health care law, federal Judge Roger Vinson used Mr. Obama‘s own position from the 2008 campaign against him, arguing that there are other ways to tackle health care short of requiring every American to purchase insurance.

“I note that in 2008, then-Senator Obama supported a health care reform proposal that did not include an individual mandate because he was at that time strongly opposed to the idea, stating that ‘if a mandate was the solution, we can try that to solve homelessness by mandating everybody to buy a house,’” Judge Vinson wrote in a footnote toward the end of the 78-page ruling Monday.

Democrats have established quite a recent history in thumbing their noses at the Constitution.

Charles Krauthammer had this to say on Fox News Special Report on January 5th about Democrats literally boycotting the reading of the Constitution on the House floor:

KRAUTHAMMER: “It is truly astonishing. One member of Congress called it a long, dull document. The New York Times editorial reading of the Constitution in the House is presumptuous. Liberals got in trouble in the 60s and 70s for being on the wrong side of the flag and the anti-war demonstrations and now three decades later, they want to be on the wrong side of the Constitution.

The Constitution, after all – when these members were sworn in today, that they did not swear to defend the country or the army or the people; it was to defend the Constitution. That is the essence of America, and it is what makes us unique and why we are a country not of blood or race but ideas. For liberals to think that there is actually an advantage in dismissing reading the Constitution and the requirement of having a constitutional reason to introduce a bill is real bad politics.”

It wasn’t just “bad politics.” Krauthammer underscored that better than anyone. It was contemptible citizenship. It was the act of unAmerican people.

It is beyond official at this point. We can separate the population of the United States of America into two groups: the American people and the unAmerican people. And the Democrat Party has become the party of the unAmericans.

UnAmericans don’t give a damn about America. They want to change it, pervert it, warp it, distort it. They want to make it into something that it never was and never should have been. And they call their effort “hope and change.”

Mind you, that’s “hope and change” in the direction set by Karl Marx; never the one set by George Washington.

Let’s take another bus tour to how we got ObamaCare shoved down our throat:

Speaker of the House of Representatives, Rep. Nancy Pelosi:

(CNSNews.com) – When CNSNews.com asked House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) on Thursday where the Constitution authorized Congress to order Americans to buy health insurance–a mandate included in both the House and Senate versions of the health care bill–Pelosi dismissed the question by saying: “Are you serious? Are you serious?”

Yeah, people who actually care about the Constitution, and care about the fact that our lawmakers – who take an oath to uphold the Constitution – actually consider it.

Rep. Pete Stark, responding to a question on health care:

Questioner: “If this legislation is constitutional, what limitations are there on the federal government’s ability to tell us how to run our private lives?”

Rep. Stark: “I think that there are very few constitutional limits that would prevent the federal government from rules that could affect your private life. now the basis for that would be how does that affect other people.”

Questioner: “The constitution specially enumerates certain powers to the federal government, and leaves all other authority to the states. The constitution is very limited as to what it can do…. if they can do this, what can’t they do?”

Rep. Stark: “The federal government, yes, can do almost anything in this country.”

Liberal Supreme Court justices imposed abortion on the grounds of a fundamental right to privacy – which is actually nowhere to be found in the Constitution – based on nothing more than “penumbras and emanations” discerned from gazing into the Constitution like a crystal ball rather than like a historical document. Now they are saying there IS no right to privacy of any kind, whatsoever in order to impose government health care and all the violations of rights and liberties that go hand-in-hand with that imposition. Because it never was about the Constitution or even about any right to privacy; it was always about using whatever rhetorical argument they wanted to get the result they wanted. So they said we had a right to privacy until the right to privacy got in their way.

If the federal government can do almost anything in this country, how then do you stop the next dictatorship? How do you stop tyranny? How do you stop totalitarian big government?

And let’s consider a corresponding Democrat’s statement on the same subject of government health care:

“The harsh fact of the matter is when you’re passing legislation that will cover 300 million American people in different ways, it takes a long time to do the necessary administrative steps that have to be taken to put the legislation together to control the people.”

And, of course, Dingell is right: it takes time and effort to abandon the Constitution – which places limits on federal power – and then impose controls on the people that utterly abandon any scintilla of any meaningful form of constitutional government.

Carnahan: “We’re going to also have a libertarian and a Constitution Party candidate running. And I will tell you no one’s going to know who they are, but it’s not going to matter, because Glenn Beck says you’re supposed to be for the Constitution, and there is some percentage of people who will go vote for them. And in our internal polling about six or seven percent goes like that to the Libertarian and Constitution Party. So I’m quite sure that whoever wins is going to do it with less than fifty percent of the vote.” […]

Donor: “You just don’t sound like those Constitution Party votes are going to come out of your account.”

Carnahan: “What do you think?” (Audience laughter)

Donor: “I think you’re right.” (Audience laughter)

Here’s the Youtube audio of that exchange:

Stop and think about that: it is a matter of mocking derision that no one who actually cares about the integrity of the Constitution is going to vote for the Democrats. And in fact Robin Carnahan – who is serving as a Democrat in the office of Secretary of State – cynically intends to exploit the fact that she can divide those who care about the Constitution and win by attrition.

And they mock the fact that no one who votes Democrat gives a leaping damn about the Constitution.

“Actually, I think really what it was was an effort to get the Tea Partiers to think that they really have some sort of revolutionary plan, because at the beginning they quote a lot from the Constitution, the idea that free people can govern themselves, that the government powers are derived from the consent of the governed.

All that stuff that I think that, that that’s an effort to try to appeal to those people, the Tea Party.

“The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”

Let’s just go ahead and abolish it so we can have the kind of totalitarian big government that Democrats yearn for. Because Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot, Fidel Castro, Kim Jong Il, and all these other leftist dictators were just such groovy people, and we need their ilk here in red, white and blue America.

Yeah, that’s right. Ridicule me, Rep. Schakowsky. Call me a “tenther” like I’m a “birther” or a “truther” or some sort of nutjob because – unlike Democrats – I actually honor our Constitution and our Bill of Rights.

“A public option will put the private insurance industry out of business and lead to single-payer” – Rep. Jan Schakowsky (to wild applause).

Marxism and communism is not extreme. Nope. It’s not extreme to use ObamaCare as a vehicle to put the private sector out of business so you can sneak in a government-planned economy. What’s “extreme” is believing in the Constitution that Democrats such as Jan Schakowsky once deceitfully swore an oath to uphold.

Democrats spent over a year imposing 2,700 pages of unconstitutional “laws” upon a people who never wanted it. And now, amazingly, they’re demanding that Republicans merely recognize that it’s done and over with, and move on.

Fortunately, Republicans DO care about the Constitution. And they’re going to fight Democrats for the soul of this country.

Apparently Ron Wyden joins such illustrious Democrat company as John Conyers (“What good is reading the bill…?”), Nancy Pelosi (“We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it”), and Ben Nelson (“I don’t think you want me to waste my time to read every page of the health care bill”), in not bothering to read the evil ObamaCare bill that he personally voted for and vigorously supported.

I’m wondering if the only Democrat who actually bothered to read the health care takeover bill he voted for is John Dingell, who accurately said of the bill, “It takes a long time to do the necessary administrative steps that have to be taken to put the legislation together to control the people.”

Here’s the story of Democrat Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) actively turning against the ObamaCare boondoggle:

SEPTEMBER 3, 2010Wyden Defects on ObamaCareThe Oregon Democrat breaks ranks with the White House.
Most Democrats have come to understand that they can’t run on ObamaCare, but few have the temerity of Ron Wyden. The Oregon Senator is the first to break with the policy underpinnings of the bill he voted for.

Last week Mr. Wyden sent a letter to Oregon health authority director Bruce Goldberg, encouraging the state to seek a waiver from certain ObamaCare rules so it can “come up with innovative solutions that the Federal government has never had the flexibility or will to implement.”

One little-known provision of the bill allows states to opt out of the “requirement that individuals purchase health insurance,” Mr. Wyden wrote, and “Because you and I believe that the heart of real health reform is affordability and not mandates, I wanted to bring this feature of Section 1332 to the attention of you and the legislature.”

Now, that’s news. One of the Democratic Party’s leading experts on health care wants his state to dump the individual mandate that is among ObamaCare’s core features. The U-turn is especially notable because Mr. Wyden once championed an individual mandate in the bill he sponsored with Utah Republican Bob Bennett. We have differences with Wyden-Bennett, but it was far better than ObamaCare and would have changed incentives by offering more choices to individuals and spurring competition among providers and insurers.

Mr. Wyden should have known better than to vote for ObamaCare given his market instincts and health-care experience. Even so, the price for his support included the Section 1332 waivers that he is now promoting. In addition to the individual mandate, states may evade regulations about business taxes, the exact federal standards for minimum benefits, and how subsidies are allocated in the insurance “exchanges”—as long as the state covers the same number of uninsured and keeps coverage as comprehensive.

Medicaid also grants some indulgences toward state flexibility, even if those waivers are difficult to acquire. The Secretary of Health and Human Services would need to approve the ObamaCare alternative of Oregon or any other states, and the waivers don’t start until 2017, three years after ObamaCare is supposed to be up and running. It is also hard to see how anyone in the current Administration would grant them.

These practical realities aside, Mr. Wyden’s move may be more important as a political signal. Mr. Wyden is running for re-election this year. And while he is now well ahead of GOP challenger Jim Huffman, in a year like this one he has cause to avoid becoming Barbara Boxer or Patty Murray, who may lose because they’ve remained liberals from MSNBC central casting.

This sort of thing also isn’t supposed to happen to newly passed entitlements. Democrats have long believed that once an entitlement passes, however unpopular at the time, voters and business will grow to like it and then Republicans begin to come around. The exception was a catastrophic-coverage program to replace private “Medigap” policies, which Democrats passed in 1988 and repealed a year later amid a public furor.

On ObamaCare, Democrats are having the first political second thoughts, at least in this election season. Mr. Wyden is essentially saying that what his party passed is not acceptable, and if such thinking builds, opponents may have a real chance to replace ObamaCare with something better.

Never forget, “Democrat” actually stands for “Demonic bureaucrat.” And whenever Obama or Democrat leadership needs a vote from a Democrat, they’ll get it. Votes are largely assigned in the party machine. Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid will allow vulnerable members to vote ‘no’ on their pork barrel bills if they have enough votes to pass them. But virtually all of those representatives and senators who voted ‘no’ on bills like the $862 billion stimulus and ObamaCare would have voted ‘yes’ if it had been necessary for them to do so.

And just as many Democrats said they’d vote against ObamaCare until they voted for it (think Bart Stupak and his gang of supposedly pro-life Democrats) – often getting incredibly sweetheart deals for their treachery (think “Louisiana Purchase,” think “Cornhusker Kickback,” among others), the fact of the matter is that you can’t trust Democrats to follow through with whatever the hell they promise they will or won’t do. If you like relentless liberal socialism, then vote for Democrats. But don’t be stupid and vote for your Senator or Representative because they say they’ll oppose Obama. Because the next time they’re needed, they’ll be right back on board, voting as they’re told to vote.

I mean, quit being Charlie Brown thinking Lucy will finally hold the football so you can kick it. She won’t. And Democrats won’t oppose the liberal agenda; they’ll support it, they’ll be its footsoldiers, just like they were the last two years.

If you want less of this, please don’t vote for the party that imposed it. Vote for the party that united against it: the Republican Party.

Democrats have repeatedly demagogued Republicans as “the party of no” even when THEY had been the party of no when Republicans were in charge. But being the party of no is a GOOD THING when the party in power seeks to pass one awful, America-destroying bill after another.

The American people are now finally beginning to realize the fact that “Democrat” actually stands for “Demonic bureaucrat,” rather than having anything whatsoever to do with “democracy.”

Let me quickly set a beautiful recent illustration for you: Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick had just been asked by an interviewer about the Glenn Beck 8/28 “Restoring Honor” rally at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. He was asked, “Are you troubled that it was there when it was and where it was?”

And Democrat Deval Patrick, the author of the “Just Words” speech that Obama pirated with such stunning success that it likely won him the presidency, responded:

“It’s a free a country. I wish it weren’t, but it’s a free country.”

I guess “freedom” is just a word, too, isn’t it, Deval?

And of course Patrick wishes it wasn’t a free country. Because he’s a Democrat, and Democrats have been fundamentally opposed to freedom ever since the REAL Lincoln that the Lincoln Memorial honored was fighting Democrats to free the slaves.

And you thought that a libtalker declaring a public space too sacred for God would be the dumbest quote from the Left on the Restoring Honor rally hosted by Glenn Beck. Michael Graham from Boston’s WTKK posts a clip of Governor Deval Patrick responding to a question about the rally by noting first that it’s a free country — and then that he’s not terribly happy about that, either:

Let me remind you this has been going on for years. We are bringing it to a halt. The harsh fact of the matter is when you’re going to pass legislation that will cover 300 American people in different ways it takes a long time to do the necessary administrative steps that have to be taken to put the legislation together to control the people.

So don’t you worry your stupid, ignorant (and if you live in Arizona racist) little proletariat heads, American people. Democrats are taking care of you like the apathetic herd animals you are. They’re ensuring your freedom from tyranny by incrementally taking over every aspect of your lives.

Except:

(CNSNews.com) – During his speech at a National Press Club luncheon, House Judiciary Chairman John Conyers (D-Mich.), questioned the point of lawmakers reading the health care bill.

“I love these members, they get up and say, ‘Read the bill,’” said Conyers.

“What good is reading the bill if it’s a thousand pages and you don’t have two days and two lawyers to find out what it means after you read the bill?”

In remarks at the 2010 Legislative Conference for the National Association of Counties, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said, “But we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it, away from the fog of controversy.”

That’s right. You can’t understand the bill. Even our congressmen who voted for it didn’t bother to read it. If you want to know what’s in the bill, you have to first bite into it like mystery meat and vote on it first. And, of course, reading the bill is a complete waste of time. If the experts in Washington think so, then it surely must be true. So don’t read it, because there’ s a long, ugly process about controlling the people.

These Democrats were outraged – OUTRAGED – that the unwashed masses would dare – would DARE – to read the bill that they wouldn’t bother themselves to read and point out the many lies Democrats were spouting off to defend a bill that (and I must say it again) they didn’t even bother to read.

“The bottom line is that you will lose your health care under this legislation, if not your job, your country as they bankrupt America, and maybe ultimately your life or the life of a loved one. All that to make dreamy, emotionalized, liberals happy, even though many of them are not happy because the socialism in the bill is not overt enough. Moreover, the promises made to the American people to pass the bill are shown in the study to be thoroughly false.”

Democrat = Demonic bureaucrat. Vote them out, or suffer the catastrophic result of “God damn America.”

In an incredible news break just as I prepare to publish this, Democrat Ron Wyden – who was one of the principle backers of ObamaCare – has just defected and ran, not walked away from the profoundly freedom-slaughtering legislation he voted for.

WASHINGTON — It is often said that the new health care law will affect almost every American in some way. And, perhaps fittingly if unintentionally, no one may be more affected than members of Congress themselves.

In a new report, the Congressional Research Service says the law may have significant unintended consequences for the “personal health insurance coverage” of senators, representatives and their staff members.

For example, it says, the law may “remove members of Congress and Congressional staff” from their current coverage, in the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program, before any alternatives are available.

The confusion raises the inevitable question: If they did not know exactly what they were doing to themselves, did lawmakers who wrote and passed the bill fully grasp the details of how it would influence the lives of other Americans?

The “party of yes” turns out to be a bunch of total freaking idiots who didn’t have a clue what they were saying “yes” to.

I’m reminded of Nancy Pelosi’s words:

“But we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it, away from the fog of the controversy.”

We might be able to get away from the fog of controversy, but we will never get away from the fog of absolute stupidity as long as Democrats are in control of anything.

You’d better be ready to scramble for a new health care plan. Because it very much appears that Obama’s “If you’re happy with the plan you have, you can keep it” slogan is bound for the toilet bowl of broken promises.